i just randomly picked parts based on what newegg had available. i reused a hdd and a bluray burner.it is an AMD 8 core 125w cpu with ATI hd7770 gpu. windows 7 because it is for gaming, the games from gamefly instead of tpb. it will run steam because the free game is a steam code. if i do dvds or blurays it will be of legal content like from the internet archive. i tried using bluray in linux, and it was shoddy coding at best, not giving features of the command line strings the guis were interfacing for. and i like command line only where it is needed. not everywhere because it is too memory intensive learning a skill set and then not use it enough. computers make my life better, or they find the bin. i went overboard on the power supply thinking i might need crossfire, but it's energy efficent, and 80gold certified psu. oh well, it has a single stick of 8gb ram i might buy more if i ever learn virtual machines. it's tco sofar is $800. that includes windows 7, because i don't quite trust the desktop to linux when i just lost my second open source machine and my first linux one. i lost a freebsd running from a 486 once, sigh. i've had various backup devices and schemes, but the one that works best is always have a removable media source that can not be overwritten easily.

i gave linux mint 2 tries so far. the first time it broke the wireless network on my laptop to everything but windows and ubuntu

the second machine (pos emachines) died so completely that i scrapped it for parts. that was under linux mint. my laptop loves ubuntu and my phone loves android, having a gaming rig running windows doesn't mean i won't have open source on my network.